Mystical balls
FEEDBACK has been discussing probability with friends. Inevitably, we got onto the subject of lotteries – and particularly whether “systems” could work. A popular suggestion was to pick numbers that hadn’t come up recently. Stands to reason, people said: if the draw is fair, eventually each number must come up as often as the others, so these are overdue.
“Yes, ‘eventually’,” says a mathematician we know, “but do you know quite how big infinity is?”
“That’s just the gambler’s fallacy,” say others who list “debunking” as a hobby. And, lo! The UK’s National Lottery publishes bar charts of the most and least frequent numbers, with the preface: “Despite the draws being…
